Copyright claims on YouTube now require timestamps

What you need to know

Copyright holders that abuse the manual claim system will lose access to it.

There are new tools for muting copyrighted music or replacing it with another track.

Copyright claims on YouTube are a necessary evil. They're important for copyright owners to claim content of theirs if it's being used without proper credit, but at the same time, the manual claim tool has proven to be easily abused and has caused a lot of headaches for large and small creators alike.

On July 9, YouTube announced a few changes coming to the way copyright claims are handled to hopefully make things easier for both parties.

The biggest change is the fact that manual copyright claims now require a timestamp to indicate specifically where in a video copyrighted content is being used. Per YouTube:

Just as you would if you receive an automatic claim from our Content ID matching system, you'll now see timestamps in Creator Studio when you get a manual claim. Check out the Video Copyright Info page in YouTube Studio that offers a visualization of where the manually-claimed content appears in your video, and also, it provides more info about the content being claimed. We'll be evaluating the accuracy of these timestamps.

On top of that, YouTube also says any copyright owners that continually make claims without accurate data will lose access to the manual claim feature.

If a video does end up getting a legitimate claim, creators now have a couple of new tools to edit their video to ensure all is well.

Creators can mute the timestamp in part of a video with copyrighted music.

Using YouTube's Audio Library, claimed music can be swapped out with non-copyrighted tunes.

Later on down the road, YouTube says it'll offer an "explicit Trim" feature that'll "allow you to trim out the claimed content with just one click."